Male In­ter­na­tional Triath­lete of the Year

Af­ter a tough day at the 2017 Iron­man AWorld Cham­pi­onship in 2017, Jan Fro­deno sat down with his man­ager and planned out the 2018 sea­son. He would take on Lionel San­ders at Iron­man 70.3 Ocean­side. Pa­trick Lange at Iron­man 70.3 Kraich­gau and again at the Iron­man Euro­pean Cham­pi­onship in Frankfurt. He’d take on Alis­tair Brown­lee and Javier Gomez at the Iron­man 70.3 World Cham­pi­onship in South Africa. Then he’d make an­other run for the Kona ti­tle.

Other than the fi­nal race on that cal­en­der, 2018 could not have gone any bet­ter for the 2008 Olympic cham­pion. He dom­i­nated in Cal­i­for­nia and at the two races in Ger­many. He took what many con­sider to be one of the most ex­cit­ing races our sport has ever seen as he ran clear to take the 70.3 worlds over an­other cou­ple of ath­letes who will go down as amongst the great­est our sport has ever seen.

Then dis­as­ter struck. A stress frac­ture side­lined Fro­deno from Kona and he had to watch as Pa­trick Lange be­came the first man to break the eight-hour bar­rier in Kona. It would have been the ul­ti­mate way to end his ca­reer – a win and a record in Kona. (Fro­deno ad­mit­ted dur­ing in­ter­views in Kona this year that he had planned to re­tire if he had been able to cap­ture an­other Kona ti­tle.) The good news from all that is we’ll get to see Fro­deno com­pete for an­other year in 2019.

Fro­deno’s in­cred­i­ble sea­son rel­e­gates Lange’s amaz­ing Kona race as a “per­for­mance of the year,” rather than one that might have net­ted him our in­ter­na­tional triath­lete of the year ti­tle. It also over­shad­ows Mario Mola’s third straight world-cham­pi­onship sea­son, too.